cruzin' Hawaii

We decided to come back to the USA when we did because my extremely generous parents offered to take on a cruise to Hawaii with them. So three days after arriving back in the country we met up with them in San Francisco and boarded the ship. The sailaway out of San Francisco was, as you would imagine, amazing:

We were at sea for four days and spent our time sleeping, relaxing, doing trivia, going to a couple lectures on Hawaii, occasionally visiting the gym, and of course eating a ton. It felt great to gain back some of those pounds that I had lost over the last 7 months.

Our first stop in Hawaii was Maui. Unfortunately my dad was sick so it was just JJ, my mom and I that headed out to see Haleakala Volcano National Park. If you don't already know this about me then I am big into the national parks. It is something of a goal of mine to visit all of the 59 national parks and I was super excited to see the two that are in Hawaii. So the three of us headed up on the long but incredible drive up to the park, which took us from sea level all of the way up to the summit at 10,000 feet. The terrain changed from green lush topics, to plain meadows, to mountainous pine forests, and then finally to a barren dead lava landscape that look down into the clouds.

the Néné, looked for this bird the whole time, and finally found one chilling in the parking lot when we were leaving

mom and i

JJ in the clouds

The next day we arrived into the island of Hawaii, which meant it was time to head to Hawaii's second national park: Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park. Thankfully my father was feeling better so we all headed out to see the volcanic magic. Inside the park are two still active volcanoes, so the landscape is otherworldly. The most famous activity in the park is the lava that flows out into the Pacific Ocean, creating the "newest land on earth". But driving through the heart of the park you get to see the usually sudden changes from rich rainforest into a dead black landscape that was "recently" covered in lava and then to new plants that have started to reclaim the dead earth.

That day we also made it out to see the 'Akaka Falls State Park. The park and it's waterfalls were of course beautiful, but the thing that stole the show for me was the three inch long Hawaiian freshwater goby fish. We didn't see this fish, but our minds were blow when we learned that it uses a sucker on its underbelly to climb up this 442 foot waterfall in order to spawn. A three inch fish climbing that waterfall! Insane!

Our next stop was Kona on the big island. It was here that I started to feel kind of off. I won't go into detail but it started with body aches and just regressed from there. Over the course of the next five days I had a rotation of ailments that kept me curled up in a ball in the cabin and later hotel room. I'm still not sure what it was, the first doctor said a sinusitis (which didn't make much sense) and the second said a viral infection and dehydration. The only thing that I was able to see during this time was when we cruised past the stunning and remote Na Pali Coast on Kaua'i.

Luckily I was able to recover enough in time to see some of Honolulu, Pearl Harbor, and the crazy blue waters of the Oahu coast.

ʻIolani Palace, Honolulu

Father Damien Statue at the Hawaii State Capital

Pearl Harbor

Oahu coast

Oahu coast

Over the last eight months we have been to a decent amount of places where people throw out the "paradise" word. Of those places Hawaii seems to me to be the most apt. What a place! Thanks mom and dad!

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more Hawaii pics at our flickr

And now, San Francisco

We flew back to San Francisco on March 11th...I'm trying to figure out how to describe how I felt...I was happy to be back where I knew how things work and couldn't believe that time had passed so quickly. What did we do first? We took BART straight to get a burrito in the Mission District. Home, sweet, home burrito! Nothing like getting a good burrito with good salsa. We were however, shocked by how much it cost, $23 for 2 burritos and 2 drinks. CALIFORNIA IS EXPENSIVE, totally worth it though. Hmm, overall it is strange to be home and I think it's mainly because we actually don't have a home. Our stuff is in storage and so we're going to keep living out of our bags until we get it all figured out.

We only had a few days in the Bay Area before we left for Hawaii (see next post to hear about that trip) but we managed to see several friends, get a working cell phone number, and I got a job. Big thanks to Mike and Gi for letting us stay with them for a few days. We hope to be seeing more of our friends and family in the coming months, we missed you!

A few hours in Shanghai

Our red-eye from Kota Kinabalu got us into surprisingly cold Shanghai early in the AM. We had 8 hours to kill here until our final flight would take us back to SF. Since Janet packed her coat in our (free) checked luggage she decided to just stay in the airport instead of dealing with the cold and the one hour train ride into the city with me.

After a few somewhat eerie minutes of wandering around the huge empty space for customs a security dude started to scorn me for either being late, early or maybe just for being there at all. Eventually he found someone to carefully look over my passport and give me an entrance stamp. The hour long metro ride into the city flew by. The rush hour train was packed, and clean, and people were all very well behaved, but that might have been because most of them were immersed in the American Idol type show that they all seemed to be silently watching on their phones. Picture dozens of straphangers in an oddly lit place grinning down to their glowing phones and swaying with the movement of the train. A Hitchcockian scene that I wish I had taken a picture of.

When I arrived at People's Park station a group of young Chinese people asked me to take their picture. I did and we got talking. They wanted to practice their English so they invited me to go to a tea tasting with them. I cautiously agreed and we arrived into a very homey tea house where we were served a pot of very expensive tea. When I say expensive I mean 450 Chinese Yuan or like $70 USD for a single pot! This is split between the five of us so I end up paying about $13 USD for a few ounces of tea. I've thought about it a lot and am fairly sure they weren't scamming me, and that that was just a normal price to pay for some fancy-ass tea. Regardless I had a very nice time talking with them. They had all sort of questions for me about life in the US and about my thoughts on their country. They shared their surprise that I was not overweight because they assumed all Americans are overweight. And then an hour later another lady said the same exact thing to me! I'm not sure why but I was somewhat offended by this. Obesity is obviously a serious problem for the US, but to assume that all Americans are overweight is unfortunate. Important to remember how wrong some of these assumptions are and to try and not make them about other cultures.

People's Park

People's Square

The 90 Yuan that the tea shop cost me was literally my lunch money, so instead of getting some food I walked around People's Park and watched hundreds of people do calisthenics and other morning exercises. I eventually made my way to the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Center, a museum dedicated to the city design of Shanghai. So were talking exhibits on public transportation, architecture, environmental resources and more generally on the history of the city. Do I know how to party or what? The major piece of the center is a huge scale model of the city, which takes up an entire floor.

Here are some infographs they had about how fast they built and expanded their metro system that blew my mind. I'd be so pumped if BART expanded at a 1/100th of this rate.

Unfortunately I was out of time and yuan and had to head back to the airport. My visit didn't go exactly as planned, as I didn't get to visit the Bund or any other part of the humongous city aside from the few blocks around People's Park, but it was a nice enough 2-hour sampling of a place I don't plan to head back to anytime soon.

Back at the airport I met back with JJ and we ate some overpriced crap food and eventually boarded a plane that took us on our last red-eye of the trip.

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a few more photos here